Well, true, there are no hard and fast rules. Whatever works. Some things work better than others, though! The hypothetical system we're arguing about is kind

Well, true, there are no hard and fast rules. Whatever works. Some things work better than others, though! The hypothetical system we're arguing about is kind of ridiculous anyway. No-one is going to go to these lengths to protect just one tiny aspect of their operation, and if they did, it would be dwarfed by everything else. And this hypothetical secret-keeping operator is just going to tell the cops the secret within 5 minutes anyway. You can't "defeat" a country's own government, on their turf, like this. And let's not even think about the time we've wasted arguing about storing the IPs when the real solution would seem to be to just not store the damn search string .. Lol, this horse is dead all right.